competitive research pdf

Competitive Research & Market Analysis with SEMrush Q&A Guide for Marketing Practitioners Table of Сontents Introduction Researching New Markets and Niches Q1: How to estimate new market potential for your business? Q2: How to quickly overview a niche? Establishing Co-Marketing and Affiliate Partnerships Q1: How to choose a partner that can bring you the highest conversion? Q2: How to evaluate the relevance of the future partnership? Media Buying Optimization Q1: Where to find prospective publishers for your ads? Q2: How to choose the best publisher website? Analyzing Your Competitors’ Marketing Strategies Q1: How to evaluate your competitor’s website performance? Q2: How to outperform rivals in organic search? Q3: Which paid advertising tactics work best? Q4: How your rivals approach PR and content marketing? Q5: How to have a quick dip into your rivals social media presence? Searching for Gaps and Insights Q1: How to compare competitors against each other? Q2: How to understand user behavior and get customer insights? Q3: How to enhance your strategy using undeveloped gaps in your rivals’ coverage? Enhancing Your Business Proposals Q: What data you need for a highly convincing proposal? Conclusion / 44 Introduction In highly competitive environments like the modern marketplace, obtaining accurate and timely data can make a real difference between keeping tabs on, getting ahead of, or being left behind the competition To help you collect information quickly and easily gain an all-encompassing awareness of the market or niche you are interested in, SEMrush takes you on a walkthrough of the main challenges that can be solved with the SEMrush Traffic Analytics and Competitive Intelligence tools, tailored to the needs of marketing managers, business development and affiliate managers, and sales teams Powered by advanced Big Data technologies and machine learning algorithms, SEMrush Traffic Analytics and Competitive Intelligence tools give you an opportunity to look at your rivals’ marketing strategies and tactics from all angles, qualify leads, evaluate prospective partners, and gain an understanding of demand and competition in the target market In this guide, we have gathered the main questions marketers face and explained how SEMrush tools and reports can help answer them How to use this guide You can read all the chapters one by one or go straight to the question that concerns you the most using our clickable content list above table of contents Researching New Markets and Niches Researching New Markets and Niches / 44 When it comes to business growth, two scenarios are possible: expanding geographically into a new market, and broadening your product range In either case, before you take any steps in a chosen direction, you need to learn what opportunities are in demand How to estimate new market potential for your business? Launching in a new market can mean strengthening a company’s budget or crashing it To avoid unnecessary expenses, look at the performance of your competitors offering the same type of goods and services worldwide To quickly estimate demand in a region or a country, go to the SEMrush Traffic Analytics tool and analyze the websites of competing companies which are already established in that market This way, you can easily understand if there is enough demand for you in the region, and if it is worth studying the field further, without lengthy and costly market research Take up to competitors you know (or find them via the Competitors reports of the Organic Research, Advertising Research, and PLA Research tools) and use SEMrush Traffic Analytics benchmarking options / 44 Estimate potential demand How to quickly overview a niche? If you are planning to enter a new product market, you first need to know how strong your future rivals are Using SEMrush Traffic Analytics in the interface or via API, you can learn how well they cope with market fluctuations and what market share they actually have / 44 Researching several competitors complemented by the analysis of user engagement trends will let you see regional market trends and make informed decisions on any planned expansion Benchmarking top players against each other also helps to find out the most effective traffic acquisition strategies in the market of interest If any of these tactics seem resourceful, you can quickly break them down using methods described in the “Analyzing Your Competitors’ Marketing Strategies” section Overview a market Use your free trial Establishing Co-Marketing and Affiliate Partnerships Establishing Co-Marketing and Affiliate Partnerships / 44 Sharing a target audience is a nightmare for competitors but a development booster for companies that offer complementing products or services Co-marketing and cobranding partnerships help both sides to establish in a new region or niche, expand reach, and increase awareness The crucial task here is to find a company that will make this mutually beneficial collaboration with you How to it? Once you’re done with a list of potential partners, research their website traffic to figure out if they will be able to give you the coverage you expect The same goes for prospective affiliates Before you invest your time in negotiations, find out if the partnership will be worth the effort Is the company you have in mind stable enough to sign a long-term contract with? Will they manage to bring you high-quality traffic? Won’t this engagement hurt your reputation, especially online? Find answers to these questions with SEMrush Traffic Analytics and focus on the companies with the greatest potential How to choose a partner that can bring you the highest conversion? General rule: the bigger the volume of a potential partner’s traffic and the higher its relevance, the more leads, purchases or customers you can get Start with discovering overall number of Visits and Unique Visits, especially if you deal with businesses like e-commerce, SaaS providers, and media outlets, as these metrics can reflect their total audience size 10 / 44 Look at the same stats in dynamics to learn if any of your potential partners are in trend If more and more users have been visiting their web page recently, you may want to benefit from their newly gained popularity Find out if you had any contact with your future partner’s audience in the past Take a look at the Audience Overlap between your sites and decide whether it corresponds to the goals you pursue with this partnership 30 / 44 See already covered subjects How to have a quick dip into your rivals social media presence? Social media is a standalone digital space requiring an approach and strategy of its own Crafting such a strategy can be daunting but, actually, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel It’s highly possible that you will find a bunch of good ideas just reviewing your rivals’ social media accounts With the help of Social Media Tracker you’ll be able to track and analyze what your competitors do, and their presence and engagement in social media, and then decide on the best channel and type of content for your promotion Overview tab will show you which social network brings most followers or most engagement to your rival and what content performs best 31 / 44 Monitor competitors' social media Searching for Gaps and Insights 33 / 44 Searching for Gaps and Insights Comparing competitors’ online performance Discovering user behavior and consumer insights Enhancing PR and content marketing How to compare competitors against each other? There’s no limit to perfection, the old saying goes No matter how well your business stands against the competition, you can always find something to work on The easiest way to this is to compare yourself with the market leaders Qualify your competitors Even if you know who has the biggest piece of the pie in your industry, you may still wonder which of your rivals is objectively the strongest online or how they even got there To find out all of this, turn to the SEMrush Traffic Analytics Overview reports Enter up to competitors to compare Get an immediate view of their traffic fluctuations The graphs will show you which of the researched companies has enjoyed the biggest number of visitors over the recent months Pay attention to the dynamics of a single website’s traffic Does it grow steadily? Are there any seasonal trends? Are these ups and downs common for the field or was it a specific change for one domain? Take note of the most sustainable player 34 / 44 Check your rivals’ overlap Even when you deal with indirect competitors, you may still fight for the same audience with them Find out for certain how many visitors go to your and your rivals’ websites Compare from to domains with the Audience Overlap feature of the SEMrush Traffic Analytics tool You will see: which companies aim at (and actually attract) the same users to their websites; how much of your target audience is still uncovered Just summarize the numbers of different websites’ visitors that are not engaged in the overlap and estimate the total market volume Once again, look at several locations and time periods to find out if there are any regional or seasonal gaps in your competitors’ activity Their “low seasons” could be the best time for you to step up Identify strong and weak points in your competitors’ marketing strategies Fighting a competitor at its strongest is honorable Striking their weakest point first is wise Go to the Traffic Sources tab to find out where they don’t make real progress For example, if your rival has issues with attracting traffic from certain social networks, you may want to use these channels instead and win 35 / 44 Use what your competitors have already proved to work You don’t have to reinvent the wheel If your rivals are using referrals that bring highquality traffic to their websites, you don’t have to stand aside just because you don’t want to copy them Add up to competitors to the Backlink Gap tool and get a ready-to-use list of the referring domains that are sending links to competitors’ sites Filter the list by the referring domain’s authority to choose the best sources for your own outreach Spot untapped opportunities 36 / 44 Analyze customer opinions One of the ways to learn if your competitors’ actions were actually worth the effort is to monitor them with the Twitter Mentioners report Pay special attention to the Followers column: this number lets you judge how important a certain mention is for the brand’s reputation Make sure you are not missing anything in organic search and paid advertising Use the Competitors reports of the Organic Research, Advertising Research, and PLA Research tools to update the list of your strongest organic and paid competitors 37 / 44 How to understand user behavior and get customer insights? The perfect way to treat your audience is to give them what they need In marketing, though, the question is not just what your potential customers want from you – it’s also when, where, who, and how Let’s go through each of these points When: discover seasonal trends Go to the SEMrush Traffic Analytics Overview tab and take note of any temporary ups and downs that you and your competitors may have in demand If such anomalies look like a common trend, think of the reasons behind them Where: check the websites your audience visits Don’t make assumptions about what media your target audience consumes – always verify your ideas with Audience Overlap, as user online behavior may not be that evident This data will give you a valid base for media-buying decisions 38 / 44 Who: consider users’ geo and a need for localization If you work for a (potentially) international brand, one day you may start to notice that more and more foreign users are arriving to your webpage What your company is going to with this fact is a question for a separate strategic session For now, you may just want to keep this situation in sight and be prepared for your website’s localization in the future How: study user experience on specific channels There are several things to consider: where they arrive to the researched website from (Traffic Sources) and where they go to from it (Destination Sites); if the website delivered on its promises (=shows quite long Avg Visit Duration) and even converted users into customers (=payment services are on the top of all Destination Sites) or if the on-page experience left them disappointed (=higher Bounce Rate) 39 / 44 How to enhance your strategy using undeveloped gaps in your rivals’ coverage? The easiest way to enhance your PR and content marketing strategies is to pick out the channels, resources, keywords, and topics that will bring the most profit with minimum effort Discover the least-used Traffic Sources among your rivals If there is no competition within a certain channel, it might make a perfect stage for you to stand out Compare several publishers with your and your competitors’ websites using Audience Overlap If a part of your target group is not covered by some media yet, think of getting a placement there to get all the attention of these users Go to the Backlink Gap tool to easily find gaps in your rivals’ coverage and use them for your own benefit or reach out to the resources that are linking to your competitors but not you Competitors added can be root domains, subdomains, or URLs Get new link building ideas The Keyword Gap tool will come in handy during the content marketing strategy development With the help of Keyword Gap you can perform a side-by-side comparison of all of the similarities and differences between keyword (organic, paid, or PLA keywords) portfolios of up to competing domains Expand your keyword list Enhancing Your Business Proposals 41 / 44 Enhancing Your Business Proposals Attracting sponsors Justifying your presale proposals What data you need for a highly convincing proposal? To make a strong business proposal you have to identify your prospects’ strengths and weaknesses and benchmark them against their competitors in order to understand what they may be expecting Whether you are negotiating with a potential sponsor or communicating your value to a lead or a prospect, in both cases, you need some objective stats to sound rational and promote the right decision SEMrush Traffic Analytics and Domain Overview will help you to quickly get a full picture of your prospect’s online presence If you represent a digital marketing or SEO agency, this can allow you to understand which parts of a prospect’s site or marketing tactics need the most improvement and where they have a chance to surpass their competition (and base your proposal on this) 42 / 44 You can also easily generate your prospect’s Traffic Overview and compare them to their top competitors All the information from the above reports can be exported into a customizable PDF that you can use to support your offer Spot prospect's weaknesses Use your free trial Analyze a prospect 43 / 44 Conclusion Gathering data to support your marketing decisions, you need to make sure that you are getting exactly the information you need to answer your toughest business questions The market intelligence capabilities of SEMrush can come in handy when you need to research a new market or niche, establish co-marketing or affiliate partnerships, optimize your media buying and marketing strategies, enhance your proposals, and more The most comprehensive picture of online visibility and market analysis provided by SEMrush is backed by 500TB of raw traffic data gathered from 450 million web domains covering 190 countries and regions The keyword database is the largest in the market – 10.5 billion keywords We love your feedback! Was this walkthrough helpful? Is there something else about SEMrush Traffic Analytics and Competitive Intelligence tools that you are interested in? Drop us a line at mail@semrush.com and share your ideas! semrush.com ... lengthy and costly market research Take up to competitors you know (or find them via the Competitors reports of the Organic Research, Advertising Research, and PLA Research tools) and use SEMrush... concerns you the most using our clickable content list above table of contents Researching New Markets and Niches Researching New Markets and Niches / 44 When it comes to business growth, two... could have access to their websites’ Google Analytics… Actually, SEMrush has a solution The Competitive Research Toolkit was made to help you gain insight into your competitors’ efficiency and traffic